Morefine M600 6900HX review – A Ryzen 9 6900HX mini PC tested with Windows 11 and Ubuntu 23.04

Under review today is Morefine M600 6900HX mini PC which is a generational update to the previously released S500+ (5900HX or 5700U) although it should be noted that Morefine will soon be releasing a newer version of the M600 with either a Ryzen 7 7840HS or Ryzen 9 7940HS. The current M600 (6900HX) brings both processor and iGPU improvements over the S500+ together with a couple of port upgrades and the welcome introduction of USB4, DDR5, PCIe Gen 4.0, and an additional M.2 storage slot. This review will look at Windows 11 performance together with a quick look at running Ubuntu 23.04 and experiences from using the new features.

Morefine M600 6900HX product specifications

The Morefine M600 6900HX specifications are as follows:

 

Product overview

Overview of hardware

The M600 physically consists of a 149 x 145 x 40 mm (5.87 x 5.71 x 1.57 inches) square metal case with detachable metal top and bottom. As an actively cooled mini PC, it uses AMD’s Rembrandt Ryzen 9 6900HX processor which is an eight-core 16-thread 3.3 GHz mobile processor boosting to 4.9 GHz and includes AMD Radeon 680M graphics which has 12 graphics cores at a frequency of 2400 MHz.

The front panel has an illuminated power button, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, and a USB4 (Thunderbolt 3) port. The rear panel includes a 3.5mm headphone jack, two 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports, an HDMI 2.1 port and a DisplayPort 1.4, a USB 3.2 Gen 2 port and a USB 2.0 port, dual USB 2.0 ports, and the power jack.

Internally, the underside of the motherboard accessed from the bottom of the device, contains an M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD drive (the review model included a 1TB Crucial P3 Plus drive complete with Windows 11 Pro installed):

The topside of the motherboard contains an additional M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD slot, an M.2 2230 WiFi 6E (or 802.11ax) Mediatek MT7921K (RZ608) card which also provides Bluetooth 5.2, and two SODIMM memory slots supporting up to 64 GB of memory with the review model including two sticks of Crucial 16 GB DDR5 4800 MHz memory for a total of 32 GB:

As part of the metal top of the device are mounts that support adding a 2.5” SATA drive for increased storage. It should also be noted that this detachable top is also covered with a thin layer of plastic as there are some cutouts in the metal to allow the WiFi antennas to be stuck to the underside of the plastic to ensure good reception. Care must be taken when removing the top to prevent the two antennas from ripping off the WiFi card resulting in damage to the card’s IPEX/U.FL connectors as the glued aerial attachments are somewhat stronger and will inevitably win when put to the test.

In the box, you get a 120.08W (19.0V 6.32A) power adapter and cord, an HDMI cable, a VESA mounting bracket together with a small packet of miscellaneous screws, a 2.5” SATA mounting kit comprising of connection cable and sticker, and a multilingual quick start guide.

Overview of software

The Morefine M600 came installed with a licensed copy of Windows 11 Pro which I upgraded to the latest 22H2 build 22621.1778 for testing purposes:

Key Observations

A quick look at the hardware information shows it is aligned with the specifications:

The processor’s ‘Power Limits’ (PL) are configured with ‘PL1’ set to 54 watts and ‘PL2’ set to 65 watts:

The memory is configured to run at its maximum speed of 4800 MHz:

although it is only single rank:

The 2.5 gigabit Ethernet uses a Realtek RTL8125 network interface controller:

and the WiFi 6E is provided by a Mediatek MT7921K (RZ608) M.2 2230 card:

which theoretically could deliver a throughput of up to 1.2 Gb/s as well as provide support for Bluetooth 5.2:

An additional specification image lists all of the ports:

and shows the various Type-A USB ports as either 3.2 Gen 2 or USB 2.0. I tested each of them using a Samsung 980 PRO PCle 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD housed in a ‘USB to M.2 NVMe adapter’ (ORICO M2PAC3-G20 M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure). This confirmed that all the ‘blue’ USB ports were indeed USB 3.2 Gen 2×1 i.e. 10 Gbit/s:

and that the ‘black’ rear USB ports were USB 2.0 ports:

For the front USB4 port, I first tested it as ‘USB’ where it ran as USB 3.2 Gen 2×1 i.e. 10 Gbit/s:

and then tested it as ‘Thunderbolt 3’:

For display, I confirmed that both the DisplayPort and the USB4 port work with older cables including a DisplayPort 1.2 to HDMI cable and a USB-C to HDMI (4K) cable:

Everything else worked without issue except for the second M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD slot which is covered in more detail below.

Windows 11 performance with Morefine M600 6900HX

I first set the power mode to ‘High performance’ and ran some well-known benchmarking tools to look at performance under Windows.

Storage performance from the M.2 NVMe was:

The overall Windows performance was:

with CPU performance measured as:

and iGPU performance measured as:

For real-world testing of the iGPU, I played various videos in Edge and there were no issues encountered playing videos up to 4K 60 FPS:

I also briefly looked at gaming by testing Shadow Of The Tomb Raider (SOTTR) under Steam. At ‘1920×1080’ resolution using the ‘high’ preset default settings, the built-in benchmark averaged 38 FPS:

With the ‘low’ preset default settings the benchmark average improved to 51 FPS:

Whilst the ‘low’ preset nearly reached that magical 60 FPS mark, this could be achieved by dropping the screen resolution to ‘1280×780’ with ‘high’ now averaging 61 FPS:

and ‘low’ averaging a respectable 79 FPS:

I also tried Grand Theft Auto V at ‘1920×1080’ resolution using default settings which averaged 86 FPS:

Ubuntu 23.04 Performance

After shrinking the Windows partition in half and creating a new partition I installed Ubuntu as dual boot using an Ubuntu 23.04 ISO:

After installation and updates, a brief check showed working audio, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Ethernet.

The key hardware information under Ubuntu 23.04 is as follows:

The processor’s ‘Power Limits’ (PL) are configured the same as Windows with ‘PL1’ being set to 54 watts and ‘PL2’ set to 65 watts:

The memory is also configured to run at its maximum speed of 4800 MHz:

Finally, a quick check of the USB ports confirmed the Windows findings of three Type-A USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports:

three Type-A USB 2.0 ports:

and a USB4 port:

I then set the CPU Scaling Governor to ‘performance’ and ran some Linux benchmarks. CPU performance is measured as:

and iGPU performance measured as:

I also ran Thomas Kaiser’s ‘sbc-bench’ which is a small set of different CPU performance tests focusing on server performance when run on Ubuntu:

For real-world testing of the iGPU, I played various videos in Firefox and there were no major issues encountered playing videos up to 4K 60 FPS except just the occasional dropped frame which was invisible to the eye:

Network Performance

Network connectivity throughput was measured using ‘iperf3’ on Windows. The 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports performed as expected at 2.37 Gb/s:

WiFi performance was also good with download on the 2.4 GHz band averaging 174 Mb/s and upload averaging 169 Mb/s. For the 5 GHz band, the download was 621 Mb/s and the upload averaged 607 Mb/s.

Thermal Performance

On Windows, running Cinebench R23 saw the CPU temperature rise to a peak of 90.0°C:

The Morefine M600 also includes a fan that is hardly audible during normal use and only reached 31.0 dBA on my sound meter next to the device during the testing. The maximum temperature I recorded on the top of the device was around 26.8°C in an ambient room temperature of 17.7°C.

I also ran a stress test on Ubuntu which saw similar results with the CPU temperature rising and flat-lining at 90°C where the CPU maintained an average frequency of 3735 MHz:

Second M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD slot

The key feature for me of the Morefine M600 6900HX (besides the obviously fast processor, dual-channel DDR5 memory, dual 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports, WiFi 6E, and USB4 port) is arguably the best inclusion given the size of the device, namely the dual M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD slots.

As opening the top of the device is somewhat awkward because of the WiFi antennas being glued to the underside, I decided to relocate the installed NVMe drive from the bottom slot on the motherboard to the top slot. This would allow me easy access to the bottom M.2 slot for testing of an additional drive or with an eGPUs.

Unfortunately, I found that using the top M.2 slot can crash the device under certain circumstances.

First, however, let’s look at simply adding an additional drive in the top slot given the original drive occupies the bottom slot. I used the same Samsung 980 PRO PCle 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD drive from the USB testing and confirmed that it works as expected:

However, after swapping the drives around, when I tried booting Ubuntu and running the Unigine Heaven benchmark, the device would just crash with a black screen before rebooting:

After reporting the issue to Morefine they suggested trying Ubuntu 22.04.2. But, after installing it onto the same OS drive as Windows (which remember is now in the top slot), I still had no luck running the benchmark on Ubuntu.

At this point, I assumed it was some combination of Ubuntu and Heaven so I continued testing Ubuntu by playing videos. Yet again though, the device would randomly crash when playing 4K 60 FPS videos in Firefox. So I tried running Heaven on Windows and it also crashed. This suggested to me that the device was prone to crashing when the top drive was used for the OS and graphics were required.

After removing both M.2 drives I derived a simple test plan of installing the original Morefine supplied drive and running Unigine Heaven on each OS, then swapping the drive location and repeating, and then adding my own drive and repeating the whole process. However, I didn’t get that far as the pattern was clear to see:

Given that HWiNFO64 provides monitoring I tried to identify the cause of the crash by watching HWiNFO64 whilst running Unigine Heaven. Unfortunately, I forgot to start logging so when it crashed I had no data to analyze. However visually, nothing seemed to stand out. Repeating again but running Unigine Heaven in a ‘1280×720’ window and with logging resulted in no crash, as did a couple of subsequent runs. Looking at the data I had consequently captured suggested that the crashes were not temperature related:

as there was no throttling of the CPU:

and whilst the iGPU throttled

it stayed within the CPU’s ‘Maximum Junction Temperature’ of 90.0°C.

The other factor I looked at was power consumption. During the run, the power consumption as measured from the wall was observed to average around 85 watts:

fluctuating with about a 5-watt variance, occasionally peaking at around 89 watts and also dropping briefly to around 79 watts.

Plotting temperature and power HWiNFO64 data does not show anything specific:

especially when compared to running HWiNFO64 and 3DMARK Fire Strike:

given the latter has not caused any crashes.

As I’d successfully run a stress test in Ubuntu across all 16 threads for 20 minutes, I decided to run a 10-minute throttling test in Cinebench R23 which was also completed without issue:

Again plotting temperature and power HWiNFO64 data did not indicate anything of concern:

The device did however sometimes crash in Windows when playing 4K 60 FPS videos in Edge so it again points to issues with a heavy load on both the CPU and iGPU. Certainly for the top drive, running Windows seems more stable than when running Ubuntu and both using graphics. My current (pun not intended) theory is that perhaps the current draw becomes too high and causes an automatic safety shutdown.

Given that the actual cause is unknown, I would be very hesitant to use the second i.e. top M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD slot for fear of data loss, and as such, dual M.2 slots for storage is no longer a reality.

Summary

The performance of the Morefine M600 6900HX is very good and the upgrades of DDR5 memory, 2.5 gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 6E, PCIe Gen 4.0, and a USB4 port really make this a next-generation mini PC.

Unfortunately, the issues encountered arising from the second (or top) M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD slot are sufficiently concerning to avoid using this feature for storage. Hopefully, a simple BIOS update will fix the issue.

I’d like to thank Morefine for providing the M600 6900HX for review. The model reviewed here with 32GB DDR5 and a 1TB SSD sells for $615.19 on Aliexpress. It used to be found on their website,  however, the company is in the process of upgrading the website and it shows as a 404 page at the time of writing.

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